Posts tagged with: Human Interest

On Monday, Americans will observe Memorial Day, a federal holiday for remembering the people who died while serving in the country’s armed forces. Here are five facts you should know about this day of remembrance:

1. Memorial Day is often confused with Veterans Day. Memorial Day is a day for remembering and honoring military personnel who died in the service of their country, particularly those who died in battle or as a result of wounds sustained in battle. While those who died are also remembered, Veterans Day is the day set aside to thank and honor all those who served honorably in the military both in wartime or peacetime.

2. Memorial Day was originally called Decoration Day. Three years after the Civil War, Maj. Gen. John A. Logan, the head of an organization of Union veterans, established Decoration Day as a time for the nation to decorate the graves of the war dead with flowers. Logan declared that Decoration Day should be observed on May 30 since it was believed flowers would be in bloom all over the country.(more…)

François Michelin (1926-2015), former leader of the the world’s second-largest tire maker, died early today at the age of 88. Michelin was actively involved in the French tire company, Group Michelin, until 2002, driving unprecedented growth for the company. His “passion for innovation” and “his uncompromising attention to quality” no doubt caused the tire company to thrive. Automotive News reported a statement from current Group Michelin CEO Jean-Dominique Senard: “On behalf of the Group’s employees, I would like to pay special tribute to this exceptional man who was universally respected for his values, his convictions, and his vision.”

“He was one of the greatest French industrialists in the postwar years,” said French President François Hollande in a statement. “He understood the importance of innovation and of long-term industrial development. By developing the radial tire, he transformed a family and regional company into one of the biggest French groups and one of its best-known.”

This question was once put to a little girl. She answered, “To work is to build.” What does it mean to build? To give yourself a target that you want to reach. It is ﬁnding materials to build a house—or producing tires. You think that you are building a family or a company. But, in the ﬁnal analysis, it is yourself that you are building. In my own personal case, I believe I am working all the time. To work for a business is to always keep its objectives in mind, to assimilate anything that can help you clarify them, and to ﬁnd the means to achieve them. It is also to ask yourself why things are the way they are. When you have properly understood the reason that things are what they are, you know how to make use of them. Reasoning by analogy is a marvelous tool. Quite often, different phenomena have something in common that connects them—an underlying, primary cause that allows you to understand a lot of things. You may merely be watching someone sweep the street, and you can be struck suddenly by an idea that will allow you to improve the machines that you use to make tires.

In his recent announcement that he was running for president, Sen. Ted Cruz’s said “our rights don’t come from man, they come from God Almighty.”

That raised some eyebrows in our secular culture. For example, Meredith Shiner, a Yahoo reporter, tweeted:”Bizarre to talk about how rights are God-made and not man-made in your speech announcing a POTUS bid? When Constitution was man-made?”

The idea that the “unalienable Rights” mentioned in the Declaration of Independence don’t come from God is considered obvious to many secularists. But if our rights don’t come from God, where do they come from? The obvious answer is “the State.” And as Matt Lewis points out, that means the state can take them away:(more…)

Last year Washington State’s Attorney General sued Arlene’s Flowers & Gifts on the basis of consumer protection. Florist Barronelle Stutzman had refused to sell flowers to a long time customer when the arrangements were to be used for a same-sex marriage ceremony.

Although Stutzman did not have any qualms about serving serving gay customers, she “didn’t want to be involved in a same-sex marriage.” “I just put my hands on his and told [the customer who made the request] because of my relationship with Jesus Christ I couldn’t do that, couldn’t do his wedding,” Stutzman said in a deposition.

A Benton County Superior Court judge ruled that the law trumped her rights of conscience. “Religious motivation does not excuse compliance with the law,” said Judge Alexander C. Ekstrom in his 60-page opinion.

Attorney General Bob Ferguson announced last Thursday that he would accept $2,000 in penalties, $1 in fees and costs, plus an agreement not to discriminate in the future and to end further litigation.(more…)

There’s a good deal of new research that connects things like happiness and satisfaction to experiences rather than to material goods. If you want to be happy, the advice goes, buy experiences, not things. There’s some truth to this, of course, but the reality is a bit more complex. After all, don’t you also have “experiences” when you use “things”?

In fact, I want to take a moment to write a brief note of thanks for a little material item that has notably increased my life satisfaction. It’s a small thing, a piece of metal with a rubber flipper on the end. It’s technical name is the Danco 10051 Disposal Genie. A couple years ago I read a piece by Megan McArdle that focused on gift ideas, and she recommended the Disposal Genie. As she wrote, “If the Oxo vegetable peeler is the least romantic gift ever, the disposal genie is surely in second place. It’s basically a slightly better disposal blocker; it lets the stuff you want to go in the disposal (water, small bits of food) get in, while the cutlery stays safely in the sink. If you aren’t quite ready to stuff this in a stocking, think about stuffing it in your own disposal.”

I took her advice to heart and bought it for myself. And boy am I glad I did. Every time I’m washing dishes or cleaning the sink I enjoy at least a brief moment of appreciation for this little invention. Sure, “it’s basically a slightly better disposal blocker,” but that slight improvement is enough to give me an uptick in life satisfaction every time I use it.

So thank you, Megan McArdle, for recommending the Danco 10051 Disposal Genie, and thank you to Danco and all the people who worked to create this little miracle. I have been blessed by your work.

It’s always good to welcome old friends to the Acton Building. Last week it was our pleasure to welcome Jeffrey Tucker, author, speaker, and the founder and Chief Liberty Officer of Liberty.me to Grand Rapids in order to deliver the first Acton Lecture Series lecture of 2015, entitled “Capitalism is About Love.” (We’ll be posting audio and video of his address later this week.)

Jeffrey took some time to join me in the Acton Studios to talk about the premise of his lecture, and about his take on the state of the world as we head into 2015. You can listen to the latest edition of Radio Free Acton featuring my interview with Jeffrey Tucker via the audio player below.

My TC piece is an attempt to help us to put into proper perspective political promises and policy proposals. I look particularly at the question of economic inequality and the assumptions underlying the government’s redistributive actions.

As Danielle Kurtzleben puts it, “Obama is making a case that the economy’s distribution engine is broken, and that the recovery simply won’t fix it. His solution is for government to approach redistribution as a positive good rather than a necessary evil.”

At one point in the speech, King stops to address a number of “myths” that are often heard and circulated, and one of these is of perennial interest, as it has to do with the interaction between positive law, morality, and culture. We often hear, for instance, that law is downstream from culture, and this is true enough. Thus King admits (starting at around the 33:35 mark) that there is some truth in this kind of view as far as it goes. But this does not mean that there is no place for legislation.

As King puts it,

It may be true that you can’t legislate integration, but you can legislate desegregation. It may be true that morality cannot be legislated, but behavior can be regulated. It may be true that the law cannot change the heart, but it can restrain the heartless. It may be true that the law can’t make a man love me, but it can restrain him from lynching me, and I think that’s pretty important also. So while the law may not change the hearts of men, it does change the habits of men. And when you change the habits of men, pretty soon the attitudes and the hearts will be changed. And so there is a need for strong legislation constantly to grapple with the problems we face.

Friedrich Hayek once called intellectuals “professional secondhand dealers in ideas.” And the Preacher proclaimed, “There is nothing new under the sun.” So perhaps it shouldn’t be surprising when ideas, memes, and other cultural phenomena pop up again and again.

I first noticed the song, which heretofore had been background Christmas muzak, when we screened the new documentary Poverty, Inc. earlier this year at the Acton Institute offices. That film includes a section discussing “Do They Know It’s Christmas?”

When Christmas rolled around, I had the idea to write something about the song, and connected it with William Easterly’s analysis of the differing perspectives on development offered by Gunnar Myrdal and Hayek. But I now think that even though I hadn’t read Loftis’ piece, I had seen the title before I wrote my piece. In fact, I checked Ben Domenech’s excellent email newsletter The Transom, to which you should subscribe, and there on December 3 is the following: ‘“Do They Know It’s Christmas” is the worst Christmas song ever. http://vlt.tc/1qf7‘

No doubt I saw the link, and got the idea for calling it the “worst ever” into my head. Then some days later I connected it to the Poverty, Inc. clip and wrote my piece. So the idea for calling this the worst Christmas song ever must be credited to Loftis and The Federalist. I’m sorry that I didn’t realize that Loftis’ piece had already appeared, or I would have pointed to it earlier, and given credit for the idea straight away. So in the interests of disclosure, I certainly haven’t been the only one to criticize this song or even to call it the “worst Christmas song ever.” I guess I’ve got egg(nog) on my face. The variety of voices that find the song problematic, however, should be a indication that there’s something rotten in “Do They Know It’s Christmas?” It is, after all, a song that includes a toast like this: “Here’s to them underneath that burning sun.”

“Do They Know It’s Christmas?” is like a bad earworm that won’t go away. And now I really, really hate that song!

But as Olmstead points to the diverse benefits of urban farming, I’m reminded of a story that pushes us beyond merely material and utilitarian calculus. The economist Wilhelm Röpke was a devotee of allotments for gardening and farming (Schrebergärten) commonly found in Europe, particularly after World War II.(more…)